Thursday, 27 January 2011

There is still some weather to come.

It was very cold down the allotment today. My feet were fine to begin with but my hands were really cold even with gloves.

I started digging in the manure on the new potato bed. I took out the primula plants next to the shed and moved them up onto where the brassicas are going to be this year. It keeps the primula out of the way and they will not be over shadowed there.

I dug back until I reached two retaining slabs that were leaning over. I wanted to straighten them up and make them more horizontal. This meant digging down a little more than 2 feet below the surface of the soil, digging out some soil under the path and then replacing them. Just like that. It took me about two hours.

By this time my hands were as warm new made bread, however my feet ...

As my daughter had requested my presence, I decided to collect up the vegetables that I was going to take home and go. I had lifted the beetroot yesterday with the parsnips and the last of the carrots. So I just had to scoop them into a bag. After this I went up to the Brussel sprouts and picked quite a few. There are a good few left on the plants even after picking. Tomorrow, I will be washing all the vegetables and considering what to do with them.

Two very large pumpkins I was storing in the allotment shed have succumbed to the frost and started to rot. I could not leave them there to get mushy so I scooped them up with a spade and put some into the worm bin and the rest into the charcoal bin. I don’t want to waste anything. When I was tidying up the brassicas and the carrots I got a lot of waste material. Now I could just dig this in but this might introduce club root and carrot root fly to new areas of the allotment. What I would usually do is take the waste home and put it into the big green council bin.

Well, do I need to give away my nutrients quite so easily? I am going to keep the waste leaves and roots and put them into the worm bin when there is room. The worms are not very active at the moment but they will soon finish off the waste material when I put it in. I don’t think that the brassicas or the carrots were diseased but you need to keep a tidy allotment. As Percy Thrower used to say: a tidy garden is a good garden.